[MartNorge71]

I am aged 50 and always slept well until the day of the Euro 2020 final in July when I lay awake all night after it and it as continued ever since only sleeping 0-3 hours per night now can’t understand what’s happened to me I’m trying eating well hot baths relaxing but no joy. Starting to get pains in my legs now really worried I did start on an antidepressant Mirtazapine but it made me very low and was having nasty thoughts

[Chee2308]

Greetings!
Your story is a very common one, typically starts as a night of little sleep then suddenly you get stressed over it because you don’t know what’s going on and what to do. That becomes the problem. The truth is nothing is wrong with your sleep or your body and you are just overreacting. Thinking there’s a problem when there’s none becomes the problem. If you didn’t need any help to sleep for 49 years of your life, you certainly don’t need now and sleep just doesn’t get broken like that, in a sudden way. Just keep to a regular bedtime schedule like you used to, then you will slowly recover and this episode will pass. There must be many times you had disrupted sleep in the past but recovered because you didn’t stress about it and did nothing. This is exactly what you need to do now.

[Mona352]

I have great anxiety and insomnia too. The best thing is getting to a professional sleep therapist who does CBT-i. Go to the Insomnia Coach YouTube channel or you can listen to the podcasts for free. All those things about hot baths and other things to make you sleep well don’t work well on chronic insomnia. I too have broken up sleep and so much anxiety about fear of not sleeping and wondering if I’ll ever sleep. I’m seeing a sleep therapist once a month. You need someone to guide you through the process step by step. For therapists near you go to
https://www.behavioralsleep.org/ to locate some if you’re in the United States.

[Grangers]

I have been traying to do sleep restriction on my own to no avail. I suffer from what i believe is sensorimotor ocd related to breathing and my cbt specialist (not cbti) says that not going to bed until i feel sleepy is an avoidance behaviour and it needs to stop. She wants me to go to bed at a reasonable time (enough to give me 7 hours sleep even if i dont feel sleepy) which in my case is 12:30 and getting up at 7:30 sharp. I work from home but make sure i get bright light during the day and get 30m of exercise a day just to keep fit etc. Thing is should i be going to bed and do paradoxical intention at 12:30 like my ocd specialist says or stay up until i feel sleepy in the living room on my phone or something with brightness turned way down and dark mode on like cbti says? Thing is a could stay up until 5am and not feel sleepy at all til then and not feel sleepy at all during the day. Am i not feeling sleepy due to my anxiety disorder? I have a sleep tracker and says i only get about 20 mins deep sleep and 20 min rem every night the rest is light and disturbed. I also have tons of little micro arousals through the night.

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